Antiquitopia

In my occasional review of the articles in Arts & Letters Daily I ran across a rather interesting review article about demon possession and modernity .  The article, by Josephine Livingstone about a book by Brian Levack ( The Devil Within ).  The book, to be released on April 8, has the following description: In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the era of the Reformation, thousands of Europeans were thought to be possessed by demons. In response to their horrifying symptoms—violent convulsions, displays of preternatural strength, vomiting of foreign objects, displaying contempt for sacred objects, and others—exorcists were summoned to expel the evil spirits from victims’ bodies. This compelling book focuses on possession and exorcism in the Reformation period, but also reaches back to the fifteenth century and forward to our own times. Entire convents of nuns in French, Italian, and Spanish towns, 30 boys in an Amsterdam orphanage, a small group of young girls ...